


Demain dès l’aube

by Adsilaflower



Series: Remember The Women When It's All Said And Done, For They Will Be The Ones Who Tell You What's Won [1]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: BAMF Women, Belgium (Country), Female Character of Color, Female Friendship, Female-Centric, Nazis, Nurses, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Strong Female Characters, Violence, Women Being Awesome, World War I, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 16:44:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12892263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adsilaflower/pseuds/Adsilaflower
Summary: She is eighteen when war happens again. When another strongman begins his grab for power in terrible, horrible ways.She is nineteen when the Nazis invade.She is nineteen when the government surrenders, when another Leopold allows for ruin and disaster and occupation.





	Demain dès l’aube

Here is what Anna knows:

      She is born three years after the war ends.

She doesn’t understand the difference between this particular war and the other wars her aunties mention, but this war…

As she gets older she learns how this war was different, this white man’s war, fought by men darker than her. She learns through the gaps in society, a generation of men missing, those who return, riddled with vacant stares. She learns from the missing limbs, she learns from the language surrounding it - words spoken in the same vein as Leopold the Killer and the rape of her country.

 Here is what Anna knows:

       She is born in the Congo three years after the end of the Great War. Mubavu is so far east she is almost Rwandan.

She is lighter than most, but the stares attracted are focused more on her parents, she is little more than an unwanted afterthought  (mulatto children are common, but her parent's marriage isn’t). The officials are the worst, following her mother through the sunny streets and shaded alleyways. They threaten her father, causing her mother to show fear for the first time Anna can remember. Her aunties voice their disapproval, when they come to her house Anna feels something she can’t identify.

_Shame?_

                  “This is what happens when you marry a white man”.

Her father tucks her in every night, kisses her on the forehead, and tells her how much he loves her.

 Here is what Anna knows:

       Other kids -kids like her- go to a different school than the other children in town. Her mother refuses to send her-

                    “A place where she will be shamed? A place where she will be told she is a mistake?”

Her parents teach her at home, and her father takes her with him when he goes on his rounds to visit the animals. The old men grin and ask if this is what she’ll do when she is grown. The women cluck their tongues and take her aside, tell her healing is in her bones. From their withered hands she learns thousands year old remedies. They guide her, show her what is for good, what will stop the black death in the lungs or rot in the feet.

                     “ _Dimba_ , child, this is for when the _beelezi_ medicine do not work”

 Here is what Anna knows:

       She is nine years old when her father moves them to Belgium. She thinks it will be like the stories -smoke so thick you cannot breathe- but Bastogne is surrounded by trees, beautiful and old, and very cold, and she wakes to frost dancing across her windowpane. She expects her and her mother to be alone, but Anna is not alone. She sees kids like her skipping on sidewalks in frilly dresses, trousers with dirt on the knees. Children though, few adults. Her mother tells her this is what she was protecting her from, that children like her were stolen from their mothers because they are proof of the fallacies of racial superiority.

                       “You are strong _bangala,_ but they will try and beat you down”

 

How do you explain to a child that she is an anomaly? How do you explain that les métis are overwhelmingly the result of rape? How do you explain that specials schools existed to erase the _africain_ from the child, to make them perfect little Belgians? That these children were taken from their home to be adopted by white families?

 Here is what Anna knows:

       She is thirteen years old when she finds a circus flyer with “Cannibale Noir”  emblazoned across the top. She feels pain indescribable in her heart, in her bones, in her soul. People like her locked up in cages, exhibits, and fake villages, for entertainment.

Here is what Anna knows:

       She is eighteen when war happens again.When another strongman begins his grab for power in terrible, horrible ways.

       She is nineteen when the Nazis invade.

       She is nineteen when the government surrenders, when another Leopold allows for ruin and disaster and Nazi Occupation.

 

_The resistance of her people against colonizers has gone on for over two centuries,_

_eighteen days is dirt beneath her heel._

 

          “Dix-huit jours” her mother says one night after listening to the news. An ironic smile, full of centuries of pain and pride, graces her face.

In the next four years Anna sees people more Congolese than Belgian, people who spend four in uprise, four years in resistance, people who fight in any way they can.

 Here is what Anna knows:

      She spends the war working in a hospital in Louvain. She wonders if the only reason the Nazis haven’t killed her is because she is still useful.

Here is what Anna knows:

      She is born on the 6th of June, 1921. She is twenty-three years old when she hears the Allies have landed in Normandy.

Here is what Anna knows:

      She is visiting family for Christmas when an army doctor knocks on the door. John Prior is a tall and bespeckled man from Vermont who wrings his hands as he asks her to help him aid wounded soldiers. His French is panicked and fumbled as he adds-

         “American soldiers, that is.”

          “Fils de pute,” she answers, “Let me get my things.”

 

_There is regulation in place,_

_a colored nurse may not treat white soldier._

_A colored doctor may not treat a white soldier._

 

       She attends the wounded in a recovery hospital with her uncle, far removed from the front lines, until Prior asks her to come to the Cathedral with him on the 21st. It is not the true front, but bombs are still being dropped, and men are still dying, so there is little difference. She tries to help. She has been awake for near twenty-hours and there is blood up past her elbows and she begins to tend to the next man but he recoils from her and-

   “I won’t have _it_ touching me”.

           -Anna looks at him and she wants to yell, he is dying he needs help, why won’t he let her help him, why is he filled with hate when he is bleeding out. She looks at a boy who’s country is not even two centuries old who, for some reason, thinks he is above her, she who has eight thousand years of pride thrumming through her bones, her mother has given her a lineage that stretches unending through time, her grandmother never taught her how to cure hate in all those days with love in her hands, and fuck, he is dying he needs help she can help why won’t-

               “Fine”, Prior replies, “Die, then”.

 Here is what Anna knows:

       There is a regulation in place. Coloured nurses may not treat white soldiers.

“Fuck this shit.” Anna thinks, and wrenches a man's leg back into place.

 Here is what Anna knows:

        She takes her breaks with Renee, but sometimes, when the anguished screams of dying men are trying to claw out her mind, she sits with the American truck drivers. Her English is… not good, but a few of them had father stationed in France during the Great War, and together they get by. They tell her about American jazz, how it sounds so much better than any imitation she has ever heard, about summer in Georgia, mosquitoes so thick you choke but it’s worth it when the flora is in full bloom, about Chicago, where in wintertime the avenues are strung up with lights as far as the eye can see. Hominy grits, Liebermann’s Delicatessen.

The one who doesn't smoke, who speaks the best French (Marquis Williams, the young girl in her whispers) tells her of a good man, a proud man, a man who was American to his bones and proudly served in France-

_America yielded four African-American_

_regiments for the Great War._

_But they fought with French guns in French uniforms_

_Under French commanders._

_America would not let these men succeed under her watch._

 

He had survived the war, survived Meuse-Argonne, was awarded two Croix-de-Guerre for unrelenting bravery in the face of the enemy. He wore his uniform when he shipped back home, proud to show what he had done during the war, how capable he was. But then the white men took offense to it, a black man standing tall, told him to take off his uniform or he would not like what happens next. Marquis tells her that this man who sacrificed and survived so much, who was forced to leave half his company on some godforsaken hill that is now forgotten, was beaten half to death and hanged from a poplar tree because he refused to take off the uniform.

            (“Mon Dieu.” she thinks.)

 Here is what Anna knows:

        Les Américains are asking these boys to die for freedom together, scared, an ocean away from home, but telling them they may not live in freedom together. Black or white doesn’t mean shit when death comes for them, blood seeping into the snow, red like the juice from her aunt's malalas. When bombs and mortars strike vehicles it turns the metal glowing, she learns after she pulls  Marquis’s body from the wreckage along with three others. When Prior asks her to exchange her Nurse's Whites (dull and a washed out pink at this point, blood never comes out) for Army Green, and take the job of ambulance driver in the next vehicle he finds, she almost laughs-

           “A black face in all that white snow is a pretty easy target”, she says instead, “The Germans must be terrible marksmen”.

 Here is what Anna knows:

     Renee is right, her hands are not a gift but _kibáazu_ , a curse.

Here is what Anna knows:

       She and John are celebrating with champagne, a toast to Christmas, a glass to survival, a chance for her to forget the _bikinda_ she sees out the corners of her eyes, when the bomb drops, screaming its way through the sky. She does not even have a chance to run for cover before the aftershocks throw her through a wall.

She wakes in confusion.

Ears ringing, she sees the Cathedral in ruins, dust floating in the air. An arm pinned beneath a rock.

 

Renee.

 

She sees Renee’s boy -after- , the one who looks like the picture they showed to the orphans once, over and over until they could sleep without seeing the faces of the dead family in their dreams. Skin white as snow, hair black as ebony, lips red as blood. He picks Renee’s scarf up from the ground.

    “Bien” she whispers, she wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.

 Here is what Anna knows:

       The war is over.

       Belgium is free.

       She is not free.

A _Biläla_ echoes through her soul.

She marries a soldier after the war, one who courts her and treats her like a queen. She marries him because he understands the war, and never brings her anything red. She marries him because she loves him, and she wants good in her life.

_Selfish, no._

_She just wants to breathe._  

It is 1952 and the war has been over for 6 years when she marries her soldier. He swings her around the dance floor, lifting her up like she is air and she is so happy and she is so joyous and she is alive.

It is 1960 and the Congo is free.

Her country is free.

Every Christmas she exchanges gifts and chocolates with John (“Call me Jack”), and together, they don’t talk about the war.

Her husband dies, but she lives through the new century.

She births two children, is there for 8 grandchildren, and lives to greet 4 great-grandchildren. She watches an iron curtain descended on Europe as if a play has ended. She breathes when destruction is avoided.  She helps as Europe slowly rebuilds herself. She gives a silent toast to Marquis and the soldier who was murdered when the world changes with a man like her in power. She doesn’t talk about the war.

She lives seven decades after the end of the second war to end all wars.

She closes her eyes and dreams of Mubavu. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title translates to "Tomorrow at Dawn"  
> The character of Anna is based on the real-life Augusta Chiwy, who was the second nurse at Bastogne. I took a lot of life experiences from the real Augusta, but I also changed a lot. For instance, Augusta's mother isn't mentioned anywhere after her birth, but I wanted Anna to have a happier childhood, and she and Renee LeMaire were not acquainted before their time at the aid station. The "Cannibale Noir" was a real circus "act" that toured Europe in the 19th century, when people not-white were forced to perform and viewed as entertainment for the cultured people of Europe.  
> The real Augusta Chiwy lived until 2015, and there is an amazing documentary about her life before, during, and after Bastogne, called Searching For Agusta, it is on Netflix and I highly recommend watching it.


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